Re: Freeze during early boot

> On 10. Sep 2020, at 03:57, Mason Loring Bliss <mason_at_blisses.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi, all. I'd like to see FreeBSD running on a new class of box I've got
> here. Not new hardware. These are Atom chips on Micro-ITX motherboards, and
> are interesting in that they are low-power and have dual gigabit NICs.
> They're UEFI-only.
> 
> These boxes seem to not like the FreeBSD 12.1 .iso files as written to USB
> sticks, but I could boot the installer with an .img.
> 
> That said, the resulting system as installed seems to freeze in precisely 
> the same place as the .iso-files-written-to-USB froze. I took a photo of 
> the freeze, and then realized that it was the same as when I was trying to 
> boot from the USB stick the first time.
> 
> I've got a photo of it in the bug I've just opened to complement this 
> email, along with dmesg from NetBSD and Linux:
> 
>    https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=249226
> 
> What's different between the .iso and the .img files, and how might that 
> translate to the installed system, if that's not a red herring? And how 
> might I get these boxes to boot FreeBSD? 

If the iso written to stick was able to give you working loader (in a sense that you can navigate and exit menu, enter ls, lsdev etc on loader OK prompt), then the iso, as bootable media, is ok.

> 
> The boxes don't have build-in storage so I'm installing and booting from 
> USB drives, so making modifications from another system to test things 
> ought to be fairly straightforward.
> 
> Addendum: To try -current in case it was a known issue, I downloaded the 
> mini-memstick.img, but it freezes in the same place.
> 

Because your system is freezing while attempting to start the kernel (framebuffer information is printer in loader just before relocating loaded bits to final location and jumping to kernel, the issue can possibly be either in loader preparing to trampoline or in early kernel.

If you do not mind one extra test (and as you have already done linux/netbsd tests), I’d be interested to see test results from illumos boot (openindiana or omnios for example), press esc to get out from loader menu, and enter on ok prompt: 

boot -B prom_debug=true,kbm_debug=true,map_debug=true

This is useful because those systems also boot using freebsd loader, but there is a small difference how the kernel start is prepared, and if it does get that far, maybe we can get memory map from early kernel.

But to get this issue properly diagnosed and fixed, we would need to build test versions for your system and just see what/where we will get… 

rgds,
toomas